Platform Architecture for Tight Coupling of High-Performance Computing with Quantum Processors

TL;DR

The paper introduces NVQLink, an architecture that connects HPC resources to quantum processors with low latency, supporting real-time control and heterogeneous programming for efficient quantum computing operations.

Contribution

It presents a novel architecture for high-performance, low-latency integration of HPC and quantum control systems, extending programming models to support real-time quantum workloads.

Findings

Achieved round-trip latency of 3.96 microseconds.

Supported real-time callbacks and data marshaling.

Extended CUDA-Q programming model for quantum control.

Abstract

We propose an architecture, called NVQLink, for connecting high-performance computing (HPC) resources to the control system of a quantum processing unit (QPU) to accelerate workloads necessary to the operation of the QPU. We aim to support every physical modality of QPU and every type of QPU system controller (QSC). The HPC resource is optimized for real-time (latency-bounded) processing on tasks with latency tolerances of tens of microseconds. The network connecting the HPC and QSC is implemented on commercially available Ethernet and can be adopted relatively easily by QPU and QSC builders, and we report a round-trip latency measurement of 3.96 microseconds (max) with prospects of further optimization. We describe an extension to the CUDA-Q programming model and runtime architecture to support real-time callbacks and data marshaling between the HPC and QSC. By doing so, NVQLink extends heterogeneous, kernel-based programming to the QSC, allowing the programmer to address CPU, GPU, and FPGA subsystems in the QSC, all in the same C++ program, avoiding the use of a performance-limiting HTTP interface. We provide a pattern for QSC builders to integrate with this architecture by making use of multi-level intermediate representation dialects and progressive lowering to encapsulate QSC code.